Folklorist inspires and captivates with fairy knowledge

Folklorist Ty Hulse brought the Fair Folk to Lilac City Comicon 2017. Hulse began being interested in fairies and fairy tales while living as a child in a small Yupik village in Alaska. The major source of entertainment was the stories that the elders would tell – folk tales.

“Fairy tales were more fun to me than history,” says Hulse.

Every culture has had a relationship with shamanism. Fairies often helped the shamans, and when people went on spirit quests, “they would see their ancestors living with the fairies.” Fairies would engage in behavior, like dancing, that people would want to do in the afterlife.

Folklore was often moral, but people also believed that the things told in tales could actually happen. The word fairy contains the idea of “those who control people’s fate;” they owned the land before the people moved there. They have a separate morality and often don’t understand human morals. The relationship between fairies and people isn’t always positive. Fairies might like a specific person or family and hate everyone else.

The fairies and people always needed each other. Humans had magical powers that fairies lacked. People had the magic of the forge, the magic of cleaning and the magic of the evil eye. Fairies and leprechauns couldn’t disappear if a person was looking at them. Human milk makes fairies stronger, so some stories have old or weak fairies taking the place of babies in a family. Despite the mutual needs, fairies and humans also feared each other.

Fairies may assume the aspect of a person killed and then haunt the area where the person died. If a fairy kidnaps someone, stories of the loved ones who attempted to rescue that person usually ended badly. However, they were dualistic in nature and could be overmotional.

Water spirits tended to be the most important for most cultures though Siberian peoples revered the fire spirits. Fire spirits lived in the hearth and hated family discord.

The U.S. has had fairy stories. Seattle and Minnesota had troll stories. California had stories about knockers. Rhode Island was so steeped in Vampire lore that bodies are still being found from long ago with wooden stakes in them. These stories tended to disappear in the lowlands first.